Sphere photos for Facebook
For Facebook to interpret an image as a 360-degree panorama, it needs to have the following properties :


It must be in 2:1 aspect ratio. eg, 4000x2000 pixels
It should be in JPG format (it seems that the panorama settings are ignored for PNGs!)
It needs the EXIF tag 'ProjectionType' set to 'equirectangular'.


For more information see this Facebook link about Editing 360 Photos &amp; Injecting Metadata.

To achieve this, once you have rendered your image (using an Equirectangular camera - which should be oriented level with the horizon rather than tilted) and saved it in JPG format, use a tool such as 'exiftool' (or another tool that allows you to manually specify EXIF tags) to set ProjectionType - eg, with the following command line :

    exiftool -ProjectionType="equirectangular" &lt;filename&gt;.jpg


This will add the relevant EXIF tag to the image (saving the original as an '_old' file). The resultant file should now be successfully interpreted by Facebook as a panoramic image.



EDIT : Here's an additional source of useful information - http://atterer.org/tech/android-exif-tags-xmp-pano-panorama-exiftool, including additional tags that should allow you to tweak the panoramic view as desired (NOTE : I don't know which of these are actually honored by Facebook, but worth a try) - replace the settings with your own image dimensions, etc. :

    exiftool -UsePanoramaViewer=True -ProjectionType=equirectangular  PoseHeadingDegrees=180.0 -CroppedAreaLeftPixels=0 -FullPanoWidthPixels=8000 -CroppedAreaImageHeightPixels=4000 -FullPanoHeightPixels=4000 -CroppedAreaImageWidthPixels=8000 -CroppedAreaTopPixels=0 -LargestValidInteriorRectLeft=0 -LargestValidInteriorRectTop=0 -LargestValidInteriorRectWidth=8000 -LargestValidInteriorRectHeight=4000 filename.jpeg